Dedicated to the Individual.
The smallest minority on earth is the individual; those who deny individual rights, cannot therefore claim to be defenders of minorities.
-Ayn Rand-

Use of This Blog

NOTE: All content provided on this blog is for informational, and educational purposes only. The owners; and/or managers of this blog make no representations as to the accuracy or completeness of any information on this site; or recommendations for the use, or application of any information contained on this site, or found by following any link associated with this site. Any information found, or linked to on this site, may be freely found on the internet, and is not portrayed with any intent as to its ultimate use. The owner will not be liable for any losses, injuries, crimes, or damages from the display or resulting from the use of this information.

Tuesday, March 5, 2013

"Print" your own AR Lower - using 3d Printing

“Download this gun”: 3D-printed semi-automatic fires over 600 rounds

And the Department of Justice says there's nothing illegal about it, either.

Cody Wilson, like many Texan gunsmiths, is fast-talkin’ and
fast-shootin’—but unlike his predecessors in the Lone Star State, he’s
got 3D printing technology to help him with his craft.
Wilson’s nonprofit organization, Defense Distributed, released a video
this week showing a gun firing off over 600 rounds—illustrating what is
likely to be the first wave of semi-automatic and automatic weapons
produced by the additive manufacturing process.

Last year, his group famously demonstrated that it could use a 3D-printed “lower” for an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle—but the gun failed
after six rounds. Now, after some re-tooling, Defense Distributed has
shown that it has fixed the design flaws and a gun using its lower can
seemingly fire for quite a while. (The AR-15 is the civilian version of
the military M16 rifle.)

The lower, or "lower receiver"
part of a firearm, is the crucial part that contains all of the gun's
operating parts, including the trigger group and the magazine port.
(Under American law, the lower is what's defined as the firearm itself.)
The AR is designed to be modular, meaning it can receive different
types of “uppers” (barrels) as well as different-sized magazines.

“This is the first publicly printed AR lower demonstrated to
withstand a large volume of .223 without structural degradation or
failure,” Wilson wrote
on Wednesday. “The actual count was 660+ on day 1 with the SLA lower.
The test ended when we ran out of ammunition, but this lower could
easily withstand 1,000 rounds.”

Already, he says, over 10,000 people have downloaded the lower CAD file, and more have downloaded it through BitTorrent.

“I just made an AK-47 magazine—I’ve got it printing as we speak”

While it may be easy to paint Wilson as a 2nd Amendment-touting
conservative, the 25-year-old second-year law student at the Univeristy
of Texas, Austin told Ars on Thursday that he’s actually a
“crypto-anarchist.”

“I believe in evading and disintermediating the state,” he said. “It
seemed to be something we could build an organization around. Just like
Bitcoin can circumvent financial mechanisms. This means you can make
something that is contentious and politically important—not just a
multicolored cookie cutter—but something important. It’s more about
disintermediating some of these control schemes entirely and there’s
increasingly little that you can do about it. That’s no longer a valid
answer.”
He added, “The message is in what we’re doing—the message is: download this gun.”
And he practices what he preaches. The group’s entire set of design files are made available, for free, on DEFCAD, an online library for everything from grips to lowers to magazines.
“I just made an AK-47 magazine—I’ve got it printing as we speak,” he
added. “[I’ve got a] Glock 17, we got a bunch coming, man. We’ve got a
library of magazines.”
Wilson’s group was founded last year on similar principles:

The specific purposes for which this corporation is
organized are: To defend the civil liberty of popular access to arms as
guaranteed by the United States Constitution and affirmed by the United
States Supreme Court, through facilitating global access to, and the
collaborative production of, information and knowledge related to the 3D
printing of arms; and to publish and distribute, at no cost to the
public, such information and knowledge in promotion of the public
interest.

Totally legal

So that raises the question: is this legal? For now, it would appear so.
“There are no restrictions on an individual manufacturing a firearm
for personal use,” a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF)
spokesperson told Ars. “However, if the individual is engaged in
business as a firearms manufacturer, that person must obtain a
manufacturing license.”
Wilson said that he’s applied for a federal firearms license
in his own name with the ATF in October, and he expects to hear a
response “any day now.” The ATF did not respond to our request for
confirmation of Wilson’s claims.

The law student said that anyone with the same type of 3D printer (“SLA resin and P400 ABS on a used Dimension”)
could replicate his efforts with “9 to 12 hours” of print time and
“$150 to $200” in parts. "We’ve proven that you can build one for $50,”
he said, presuming the builder is using lower quality materials. (Dimensions typically sell in the $30,000 range—but Wilson says his results could be duplicated using the less-expensive Ultimaker ($1,500) or Reprap.”

Assuming Defense Distributed’s AR-15 lower costs around $150 to
print, it likely won't end up being price-competitive with other,
commercially available polymer AR-15 lowers—a few minutes of Google
searching turned up options priced at $135 to $170, depending on the manufacturer.
Of course, lots of 3D printing enthusiasts extol the fact that the
price of the technology is rapidly falling—as we reported previously, a
California company announced a $600 model last year.
Some experts who have been following the world of 3D printing for
a while say that from a policy perspective, not much has changed in
terms of firearm production, even if the parts are cheaper to make.

“When you're thinking about it from a policy standpoint [the question
is], was this possible before 3D printing? If the answer is yes, what
was the existing policy response?” said Michael Weinberg, a staff attorney at Public Knowledge.

“Has this fundamentally changed the dynamic in a way that we need to
revisit the response? The answer strikes me as no. It's amazing. You can
imagine a world where the 3D printer is accessible to people—I am not
convinced that we need a 3D printing-specific solution.”

An earlier model of the 3D-printed AR-15 lower resulted in a crack by the rear takedown pin.

“The guns that will be”

Since December 2012, Wilson and his team have been hard at work on
two problems. The first was the fact that the lower’s “buffer tower”
(the circular ring part jutting upward that the “upper” fits into) kept
breaking—that’s what caused the initial failure that prevented the gun
from firing more than six rounds of 5.7x28FN bullets.

To fix that, the group re-engineered the buffer tower so it had
increased exterior thickness. “We doubled or tripled the thickness,”
Wilson said.

With that fix under their belt, the modern gunsmiths tried firing with .223 Remington bullets (standard in an AR-15), which raised the firing range to about 20 rounds before a failure—but that wasn’t good enough.

By the end of the month, there was a different failure, this time on the
“rear takedown pin,” where a metal pin fits between the upper and the
lower, connecting them together solidly. There, the 3D-printed plastic
was cracking around the pin, making the gun less safe to use.

“There was so much force concentrating around it that that was the
failure place,” Wilson said. “At first we started using bigger bosses
and using longer pins and realized that it’s still a cross-sectional
area. We changed the dimensions of the rear takedown pins.”

He explained that they’ve changed pin design entirely, adding “more
surface area around these pins,” as well as an “internal” 90-degree
angle, along with various curves and “steps and risers” that take
advantage of the fact that the housing is made of plastic, not metal.

“The thing was still built like it would be made out of metal,” he
said. “This is about plastic, and everything needs to be curves. It has
to act like more of a spring.”

And that, he points out, is the ultimate lesson in gun manufacturing.
“The idea is not to print components for guns that are, but the guns that will be,” he said.
For now, though, Wilson said that Defense Distributed has essentially
taken over the bulk of his time, and he’s effectively become a
part-time amateur engineer.

“I don’t go to [law school] class, but I do pass the exams—here’s looking at you [American Bar Association]!” he told Ars.

Defense Distributed, Wilson says, receives “around $100” in daily
donations, and he has an operating budget of about $2,400 monthly. He
says that the next phase will be to publish “primers” teaching people
specifically how to make such weapons.

“I don’t consider myself a tech guy, but I do consider myself a crypto-anarchist,” he said.
“I mean the philosophy that Tim May
expressed, he predicted WikiLeaks and digital currency. [What I mean
is] that the Internet and cryptography are these anarchic tools that can
allow for the expanse of citizen action. We like the idea of the market
becoming completely black and starving the nation-state from all the
money they claim.”

Search This Blog

Follow by Email

Our Mission

I am not bound to please thee with my answers.William Shakespeare

We have been following this path (active prepping) since the early 1990's. In our case this includes military training, weapons training, hunting, fishing, tracking, advanced martial arts training in open hand CQB and hand weapons, orienteering, outdoors skills, and other less obvious but important skills. Your training and skills should, as much as possible, always be seen as tools that need to be improved. You never know everything and you can always forget what you know.

This site is dedicated not just to survival, but to the people who choose to live, with dignity as sovereign beings. We see too many people who focus entirely too much energy in pleasing themselves with shallow pursuits. Sacrificing their own freedom, and independence.

I believe we can all be sovereign citizens - by living life for ourselves; and not for the sake of others, or a group, or a collective state. Too many people spend too much of their time, money and lives concerned with what others think of them, and trying to gain the esteem of strangers. This is dangerous and not only effects how they spend the bulk of their money and their life's productivity, but even how they vote and how they view governance.

This "lifepath" I just described, which I call "living life for others", (Ayn Rand called it, "second hand living"), impacts the choices many people make about the cars they drive, the houses they own, even the clothes they wear. In its most essential form, it is an unthinking compulsion, or need to impress other people. The cold fact is other people, especially strangers - do not think about, or care at all, what you drive, what you wear, or what sort of house you live in; and even if they did, is it not somewhat insane to live life this way.

This false life path of "living to impress others" or "maintaining appearances" is a central ingredient of collectivist governance, and religious power schemes. It is how organizations like governments and religions control people. This primary tool of control has been used by countless entities: organized religion; and later by governments....i.e., leninism, marxism, socialism, facism whatever you may call it. They and all other collectivist forms of control use a few simple but effective mechanisms to control people; the desire to "belong", and....altruism.

Like Spock in Star Trek - the proponents of collectivism believe "the needs of the many, outweigh the needs of the few, or the one".

But this is a false and dangerous lie....for who determines what "need" is, and how exactly is the "many" determined?

By this vague but noble sounding principle two people....maybe your neighbors.....should be allowed to get together and "vote" to steal your belongings; your food, maybe your house, maybe your children......or even your life.

Why NOT - don't their needs outweigh yours?

The right answer, of course - is NO. America was, historically, the only form of government EVER founded on the principle that an INDIVIDUAL'S needs are paramount; and that together we all make up a society of individuals and that a proper governments central responsibility is to protect the INDIVIDUAL rights of its citizens.

Collectivism is a corrupt ideology by which people are legally allowed to steal the property, and productivity of an individual, any individual. They are justified by a vague undefined notion of the "needs" of some group or collective. Which can never be satisfied because "NEED" is always great according to someone.

Modern collectivism also has another benefit to its followers - it's phony altruism provides a twisted path to easy nobility. This un-earned nobility is often driven by the need to impress others with your apparent "compassion".

The answer to this is simple - Live life for yourself. Make choices for yourself - based on the way YOU want to live, and the person YOU want to be.

Do not concern yourselves with what others do, and how they choose to live. Learn to be at peace with your choices, and find yourself and true contentment.-----------------------------------------------------------------